The significance of a banana.

I’m beginning to understand how bloggers find so much to say. Fortunately, my lethargy will continue to prevent me spending too much time putting this new-found knowledge into practice but, with another train journey to fill, I can muse a little on a totally insignificant event which nevertheless managed to achieve some momentum – and which I think I can twist into something connected with the writing process.

I was in my daughter’s car, being driven to Loch Lomond, her two sons (aged 9 and 5) in the back with her, her husband at the wheel. In front of us, a VW Beetle. Dangling in the centre of the rear window was a plastic, half peeled banana – exactly the same colour as the car.

‘Oh look, an amusing banana,’ said my daughter, with the devastating satirical tone which is obviously my legacy to her.

Never one to be out-satired, especially by someone for whom I’ve striven to be a role model for years (with limited success), I challenged her choice of adjective, suggesting that it might actually be quite a serious banana. Bananas, after all, have a bad press in that they’re always held responsible for unfortunate slip-ups (NB and sic) by politicians and others. Rather than being mere instruments of comedy as they lie on pavements or in corridors of power waiting for unwary strollers, their intent may well be to draw attention to aspects of the ideology, theology or overall morality of those whom they target.

So compelling were these considerations that we didn’t even progress to speculating on the owners of the car, who’d chosen a dangling ornament which was colour-coded exactly with their paintwork, but implicit in that choice was a whole history involving jaundice, egg yolks, fluorescent safety vests, cowardice in the face of the enemy.

And so on, and so on.

Indeed, had my two grandsons not pretty soon made it clear that the various banana analogies were becoming homicidally tedious, we could have still been analysing the socio-political influence of bananas and their role in the development of Western Philosophy when Ben Lomond loomed over us.

I know that the main effect of this blog will be to make you vow never to return to it and certainly never to share a car with me, but it does have a point, at which we’ve almost arrived.
I put a short note summarising the above on my Facebook page, whereupon one of my friends wondered whether we’d considered there might be links with a banana republic.

So my point is this. When people ask ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ the answer is ‘Everywhere’. Because it’s not necessarily the original idea that’s so important but the life it takes on and the infinity of directions it can follow. Words generate other words, synonyms, antonyms, and all of them open more doors, bring more layers of meaning. The banana was a silly example but, for that very reason, it makes the point better. If the initial idea is of greater significance – the death of an individual, the revenge of one person on another, the pulsing of some extreme passion – its ramifications are correspondingly greater.

All of which means that writing’s dead easy, doesn’t it?

Murderous Motivations

By Beth Terrell

One of the most challenging facets of mystery writing is creating believable villains. One key to this is to give your villain a compelling--or at least, believable--motivation.

I've heard that there are only 4 motives for murder: love/sex, greed, revenge, and madness. There are variations on these themes--for example, obsession is a twisted form of love, greed may manifest as a lust for money or for power, and revenge may have its roots in the loss of love or in the loss of self-esteem (personal power) through humiliation--but whatever the surface motive, dig deep enough, and you'll find its roots in one of the basic four. Self-preservation could be added to the mix, but it might be said that this particular motive falls either under love (of self), greed (fear of loss of status or esteem), or madness (if the perceived threat is, in fact, all in the killer's head).

Ed McBain once wrote about a sleuth who was driven by the desire to discover an entirely new motive for murder, one that didn't trace back to one of the basic four. He never did.

P.D. James defined the four motives as: love, lust, lucre, and loathing. It's pretty easy to tie this more alliterative list to the one given above. Love might lead to a jealous rage (a husband finds his wife in bed with his best friend), a revenge killing (a woman stalks and executes her daughter's rapists), or obsession (stalker kills actress because, if he can't have her, no one can). Lust might be lust for sex or power. Lucre might lead to treachery or blackmail. Loathing might stem from the desire for revenge over real or imagined slights.

The FBI defines four basic categories of murder. Almost all (if not all) have their roots in the four basic motivations. The FBI Crimes Classification Manual describes the categories as follows:

1. Criminal Enterprise Murder
2. Personal Cause Murder
3. Sexual Homicide
4. Group Cause Homicide

The criminal enterprise murder includes all murders committed for personal gain (insurance scams, gang wars over turf, inheritance, etc.) and those committed during the commission of another violent crime.

The personal cause murder is the result of an emotional conflict. These homicides include those in which the murderer constructs an elaborate fantasy about his or her victim and will do anything to preserve it--including killing the object of his or her fascination. Other types of personal cause murders are domestic homicides, revenge killings, "authority homicides" (in which the victim is in a position of authority over the killer), extremist homicides (committed because of the killers ideology), and mercy/hero murders (such as a health care worker who acts out of a desire to put his or her victims out of their misery). (There is also what is known as the nonspecific homicide, in which the killer's motive is never discovered, but this does not generally make for very satisfying crime literature.)

Sexual homicides are those in which the sequence of events leading up to a murder have a sexual component. These homicides include children killed by pedophiles, women killed by their rapists, and the stereotypical serial killer for whom murder is accompanied by sexual gratification. Perhaps the worst of the sexual homicides are those committed by sexual sadists, who obtain gratification by means of their victims' suffering.

Group homicides are, as the name indicates, committed by multiple assailants. Motives vary, as in the personal homicides.

The Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime (by Eric W. Hickey) lists a number of possible motivations for murder. Again, all were rooted, to some degree, in the Basic Four. This is an amazing book. It can be purchased for a hefty fee; the ones I looked at started at $154. Some of the motives Hickey lists are:

Abandonment/Rejection - the killer feels unloved and either lashes out in anger (many school shootings) or kills in an attempt to keep the loved one from leaving (Jeffrey Dahmer)
Altruism - mercy killings, saving victim from a worse fate or from a sinful life
Cover-up - destruction of evidence, silencing witnesses
Alcohol and drugs - a type of chemically induced, temporary madness
Protection of self or others - ex.: a woman kills her husband to protect the daughter he's abusing
Fatal Abuse - a habitual abuser loses control and goes too far
Frustration/Anger - perhaps a mother "snaps" and shakes her crying child to death, a man beats his father who has Alzheimer's, or a frustrated, back-alley boxer bites off the nose of an opponent
Greed - committed for personal gain
Escape - the killer feels an overwhelming need to get away (perhaps from an abusive relationship or a hostage situation, but also perhaps from a situation in which the killer is a caregiver and feels like he or she has no other way out)
Fame/celebrity - the killer believes he or she will become famous because of his or her killing spree
Hate/resentment - "Mother always liked you best."; "That jerk got me fired, took my job, and now he's sleeping with my wife. Enough's enough."
Jealousy/rivalry - a motivation as old as Caine and Abel
Sexual property - the killer sees the victim as belonging to him
Unwanted Children - a young mother gives birth at the prom, strangles her baby, and leaves it in the garbage can, then goes out to dance with her boyfriend; Susan Nicole Smith drowns her two small sons after her lover breaks up with her because he doesn't want children.

Sadly, there are probably many, many more. How about your villains? What makes them tick? What makes them cross that most irrevocable line?

Who Am I?

By Pat Browning

In today’s marketplace, with a jillion authors hawking their wares and trying to be heard above the cacophony, there comes a small voice saying, “Christine Duncan is a red-headed mystery novelist who lives in Colorado and if you see a black Honda being towed, will you let her know?”

Christine and I go back a long way, back to the halcyon days of iUniverse’s Wicked Company club, group, listserv, bulletin board or whatever it was. We were a bunch of beginners, revving up to dazzle the world with our first books.

I can’t speak for everyone but I was surprised by the wars we unloosed – the POD wars, the self-publishing wars, the e-book wars. They seem pretty quaint now, and I have a few scars to show for it, but I’m still here.

And so is Christine. I came across her blog, Rule of Three, almost by accident, and loved it. Apart from Christine’s funny blogs, the site is unusual because it features three bloggers from three different countries and with three different points of view.

Christine has been on a blog tour. On May 26, she did an interesting Q&A on Jean Henry Mead’s Mysterious People, and explained how her blog site came about:

Quote:
I met Narelle Bitunjac (the Aussie writer on Rule of Three) on Myspace where we traded stories about our writing experiences. Narelle introduced me to Michelle Birkby who lives in London.

It's funny, because superficially we are not alike. Michelle is single, a social worker, Narelle is a teacher, going back for an advanced degree, married but with no children and then there's me. I've been married forever, got 3 kids and a stepson and I do bookkeeping for my day job--and during the tax season, I do taxes--which Narelle makes fun of. And of course, we all live so far apart.

But recently when I went to see "Star Trek", Michelle was one of the first people I wanted to "talk" to (on Twitter) because I knew she'd love the movie too. We're both S/F freaks. And Narelle and I were both working (separately) on things about domestic violence. We spent the entire month of October last year doing blog posts about it, since October is domestic violence awareness month and those posts still get views every day.

We don't always react the same way to things -- we had one week on the blog where we all did posts on writing sex scenes and it was odd to see our differing reactions. And I often don't know what either one of them are talking about. Sometimes I am sure we none of us speak the same language. But it's been a lot of fun blogging with them and getting to know them better.
End Quote.

Writing a bio is the hardest thing an author has to do. Who, me? Who am I anyway? Here's Christine's humorous look at the things writers say about themselves.

****
This Week’s Bio
By Christine Duncan

Writing a bio is sort of like when a new PTA group starts up, and they go around the circle and tell you to tell three things about yourself. My three things tend to be inconsequential stuff like I have red hair (Duh! They can see that!) or just stupid stuff like I think I may have inadvertently parked in a fire-lane.

Theoretically, writing a bio is easy. I can tell you all about it. I just can't do it. The gist of the thing with bio writing is, of course, to leave out the inconsequential and to tell folks only the interesting bits. Most authors tend to go on a lot about their degrees and why they are the one person to write whatever they heck they wrote. It is a wonderful approach. I recommend it.

But I don't have a degree. I went to college for much longer than the currently accepted five year plan so there is no earthly reason why I don't have a degree. Except … that I changed majors more often than I changed colleges. And I changed schools a lot. I went to the University of Florida, San Jose State (CA.), Humboldt State (CA.), and Metro state (CO.)

They were all great schools. I was a biology major; a library science major; I contemplated an English major until I met an orderly at the hospital where I was working who had a master's in English and realized what that meant about jobs. (Ditto when I found out his best friend and fellow orderly had his master’s in history.) And then I was an accounting major because, of course, bean counters can get jobs, except that the ethics of school didn't translate into what I saw in the workplace so then … Okay, you get the idea.

So I have no real professional credentials for writing a mystery about a counselor in a battered women's shelter. What I know about them comes from my private life which I like private. But for my husband's sake, I will say, I've been happily married F-O-R-E-V-E-R to the same man and it's not about him, folks. The rest of what I know comes from my research. Many people can do research. It tends not to sound interesting.

Some authors include words like Award Winning in a bio. And the first book in the series, Safe Beginnings, did win an award from Inscriptions magazine. It was one of their 2002 books of the year. Sounds a bit dated, don't you think? And then there is the little fact that Inscriptions went belly up somewhere after 2002. Don't ask when. Many people have never heard of them.

I have had friends tell me to just say award winning then and leave it at that, but I have to say, when I see that in some author's bio, I tend to think that means they won a blue ribbon on field day in sixth grade. So I don't want to say that in my bio either.

The last thing I've noticed in many authors’ bios is that they include places where they have spoken, classes they've taught or organizations they belong to. You know the setup: "Jane Someone Smith addressed the U.N. on the Global Economy before becoming a member of the Senate Finance committee, and so on."

I don't belong to much that most people couldn't belong to themselves if they wanted to, so how is that interesting? I've taught more than a few classes on e-publishing and spoken on panels at some writers' cons but again, so what?

So here is the bio I'm thinking about this week. Christine Duncan is a red-headed mystery novelist who lives in Colorado and if you see a black Honda being towed, will you let her know?
****

P.S.
Christine says:
Christine Duncan is an Arvada, Colorado mystery writer. She got her start in writing for the Christian market, writing for Sunday School magazines. Her credits include Accent Books and Regular Baptist Press.

Although the Kaye Berreano mystery series is set in a battered women's shelter, Ms. Duncan's husband wants the world to know it's not because of anything he did!

Come visit Christine at Http://www.ChristineDuncan.com
Or at her blog Http://www.globalwrite.wordpress.com